Filmmakers increasingly depend on trailers as advertising and to generate word-ofmouth (WOM). This paper investigates the extent to which trailers influence WOM in the pre-release context by testing a conceptual model separately on the three most popular movie genres. Where viewers perceive greater understanding of the movie from the trailer, the prospect of liking it is significantly increased. This leads to a substantial increase in their intent to generate WOM and ultimately their willingness to pay to see the movie. These novel findings lead to practical impacts for studios hoping to stimulate consumer interest, with wider contributions to advertising theory.

IntroductionPre-launch advertising communications are critical for the early adoption of experiential products. Often, companies release a variety of advertising messages for the same product, which results in a lack of information consistency. Research on the effect of advertising communications with different message content is scarce. Further, most studies on information consistency rely on experimental methods, leaving the actual effect of consumer response on product adoption unknown.MethodsTreating online comments to movie trailers as consumer response to advertising communication, we propose a natural language processing methodology to measure information consistency. We validate our measurement through an online experiment and test it on 1.3 million YouTube comments.ResultsOur empirical results provide evidence that information consistency driven by trailer-viewing is a key driver of opening box office success.DiscussionInsights deriving from this study are important to marketing communications research, especially in contexts where early product adoption is critical.

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